Zach Carey is the Managing Editor of Streaking the Lawn and beat writer covering UVA football, men’s basketball, and men’s lacrosse since 2021.
A fourth year at UVA, he also writes for the Premier Lacrosse League covering the Utah Archers and has contributed to Locker Room Access and Nets Republic.
The Virginia Cavaliers men’s basketball program has its next head coach.
In a press release, UVA announced VCU head coach Ryan Odom as Tony Bennett’s official successor after interim head coach Ron Sanchez was not retained following the conclusion of Virginia’s season in the ACC Tournament.
After Odom and VCU lost to BYU in the first round of the NCAA Tournament on Thursday, UVA made quick work of making the hire official. The athletic department’s coaching search had been underway for weeks and, when the Cavaliers’ season came to an end, Odom became the odds on favorite as his name swirled to the top of the rumor mill.
This is a full circle moment for Odom in a number of ways. His father, Dave, was on Terry Holland’s staff in Charlottesville from 1982-89. During that time, Ryan was a ball boy for the Wahoos as he was eight when his dad joined the Virginia staff before Dave became Wake Forest’s head coach when he was 15.
Odom is now 50 years old and has been a head coach at the Division-I level for nine seasons, first at UMBC for five years, at Utah State for two, and most recently at VCU for another two.
He originally started in the coaching business as a graduate assistant at South Florida in the late 1990s before coaching as an assistant at Furman from 1997 to 1999, at UNC Asheville for the 1999-2000 season, at American from 2000 to 2003, at Virginia Tech from 2003 through 2010, and at Charlotte from 2010 to 2015. He was the interim head coach for Charlotte while head coach Alan Major was on medical leave during that five year stint. He then spent a season coaching Division-II program Lenoir-Rhyne in 2016 before UMBC hired him away.
In Odom’s second year as the head coach at UMBC, he led the Retrievers to the NCAA Tournament where they became the first No. 16 seed to ever beat a No. 1 seed, beating the Cavaliers 74-54 in a game Virginia fans won’t ever forget.
Odom has led three separate teams to the NCAA Tournament, winning two conference championships in the process. He boasts an all-time head coaching record of 222-126 (.638) including a 50-22 (.722) mark with the Rams.
Now, he takes over a Virginia program looking to modernize following Bennett’s retirement in October. Odom will tackle the difficult task of trying to bring UVA back to the standard which Bennett established across his 15 seasons at the helm. Since the ‘Hoos won the national championship in 2019, they haven’t won a game in March Madness. UVA will hope Odom can change that.
Now that Odom is hired, plenty more developments will be coming down the chute in the coming days and weeks. He’ll be assembling a staff which will likely consist of a number of his current staff at VCU, maybe an outside hire, and potentially one or two of the Cavalier alums such as Isaiah Wilkins, Chase Coleman, and Kyle Guy who were on the Bennett/Sanchez staff.
Odom and his staff will then hit the transfer portal and the high school recruiting trail. Former Virginia commit Chance Mallory is set to announce his commitment on Saturday. If he re-commits to UVA, that’d be a big win for the program. Odom will also likely aim to recruit a number of players currently on the Virginia roster before hitting the portal hard to build a better roster for next season.
Virginia will hold Odom’s introductory press conference on Monday at 3:00 PM on the JPJ main court. The press conference is open to the public with free parking in the main JPJ lot. The presser will also be live on ACC Network with additional live streams online.
As we always do, Streaking the Lawn will have you covered through the chaos of the next few months and the beginning of a new era for UVA basketball.
